What kind of car do you drive? Volkswagon Jetta. I just got it before the shutdown and luckily they let me back in to put the plates on. Favorite dinner meal? Snack?     Chicken Parmigiana, Popcorn. Outside of Meadowlands, what is your favorite track to visit? Monmouth Park. I’ve worked there for many years. It has that old-style feel with a lot of people and the roar of the crowd. It just feels like a real track should. What is your favorite event in racing? Hambletonian. How often is racing on your mind? Probably every day. Right now you get up and take inventory of the COVID situation and maybe think about life and what is going on. I’m always looking at tracks that are racing. People put up replays that I watch. Right now, I almost don’t want to watch because for us I know it isn’t there. It doesn’t hurt but it bothers me that I’m not working. What is your favorite thing to do outside of calling racing? Play hockey or refereeing hockey. I play in a beer league in the Ice House in Hackensack (NJ), which is the lowest level, but I made it to the college level as a kid. I’m pretty good for my age (60). I’m probably third best on my team. I can skate and handle the puck pretty good. have skills. I’m also a level-two referee for U.S. hockey officials. What is your favorite sport to watch? Team? Hockey – New Jersey Devils. What is one thing about you most fans/bettors don’t know? I hate to read books. I think I may have an attention disorder thing. I have very little patience for stuff like that. I’m also a golfaholic. I subscribe to both Golf Digest and Golf Magazine. I read both of those cover to cover, but not in one sitting. I’ve been to the golf Hall of Fame and I used to play a lot. I’m not really that good, though. What is one word that describes harness racing for you? People. It is all about the people, the comradery and the stories surrounding them. How did you get started in the sport? I met a guy in High School that was working for a trainer on the weekends and he took me to the track. I lived maybe 10 or 15 minutes from Greenwood Raceway and there was a bookstore there where I would get magazines and papers to read up on it; so much for a guy that doesn’t want to read. It was just kind of interesting. I helped mucking stalls on Saturdays and got started that way. I just went to the track all the time. How did you end up in the announcer’s booth for the first time? There was a thing in the Toronto Star newspaper saying, ‘If you want to meet somebody, who would it be?’ So I wrote a letter to this column and they set up for me to meet Jim Lampman (Ontario Jockey Club Publicity Director) and he introduced me to Earl Lennox (announcer). I sat in with him and watched him call some races. I guess it caught my interest. I got a job there in college as a Placement Judge. I called a lot of qualifiers there at 11 a.m. and once in a while the technician would come in and tell me that he was going to turn the sound on so I could hear myself. That was kind of cool. I did that for a long time. Through the Judges, people got wind that I could fill in and once in a while I would get a phone call asking for me to fill in. You call races for a living. Is that your passion? I don’t know if it is my passion. I’m kind of a student of it and I still strive to get better at it. I still have a passion for it but maybe not as intense as it was back in the day. I certainly get the same intense feeling on the big days. I always try to be professional and improve. During the last decade of my life I’ve tried to have more balance and other interests. I don’t like it any less, I just like other things. How frustrated do you get on the Friday late afternoon drive from Freehold where you call an afternoon card to Meadowlands where you call at night? It’s not that hard but you always run into some problems with the traffic. When Freehold drags its post time and Meadowlands starts early, that can be a little dicey. That nervousness has dissipated over the years. When I first started doing both tracks five years ago, there were some dicey moments when I wasn’t sure if I would make it on time. There has only been one Friday where the (NJ) Turnpike was closed and I had to take the Parkway. I actually got there before the first race started but Jason Settlemoir was upstairs already and he called the first two races. There were a few nights where I got there five minutes before I was supposed to go on, but I don’t let it bother me anymore. Did you have a mentor or someone you emulated as a track announcer? Tom Durkin would be the man. There was a lady that worked at Flamboro who won like $250,000 in a lottery. She bought a large satellite dish back in the 1980s and could get the Meadowlands simulcast show on MSG, so I gave her blank tapes and she would tape the recap show with Hollywood Heyden and those guys. I would take them home and pop them in the VCR and listen. I studied that and listened to it over and over. I would listen to Durkin and think to myself, I can do this. It’s a luck thing getting into it, but you have to network. There was no Internet back then. You had to send smoke signals out to get noticed. What is the best advice you’ve ever gotten about harness racing? Jack Stevens, the announcer before Earl Lenox, told me to just be myself. He also said to remember one thing, the stars are on the track and you are just here to highlight them. For many years in the old grandstand at The Meadowlands, I kind of took pride in the fact that people didn’t know who I was, with John Boothe and Dave Johnson there. Maybe I’m not as good as Dave Johnson was in his prime; that’s obvious. I just don’t have the high profile and I’m good with that. What was your favorite moment in harness racing? The Muscle Hill Hambletonian win that Sam (McKee) called because I was doing CBS and interviewed Brian Sears. Just being part of the live network broadcasts are exciting. Doing the shows with Gary Siebel, the American Harness Racing Series and the Breeders Crown, back when the sport had some money to spend, those were a lot of fun. The pressure of live TV is something I like. What was your worst mistake on the microphone? A couple of years ago at Monmouth, I called the horse that won the race the wrong name. After the card was over I went downstairs and asked to fix the call for the replay show, but they told me it is a sporting event and people make mistakes when they are live. It is so true. Play-by-play guys make mistakes all the time and just correct themselves live on the air. I took a lot of heat last year for the Hambletonian. I said two words that I wish I could take back, but everybody was thinking the same thing when I said it, and that was when I said Greenshoe was ‘drawing clear’ and I should’ve just said ‘coming on’ or ‘charging on the outside’ like Sam McKee would. I recovered after saying that but people were just all over me that I assumed he was going to go right by. Does the criticism bother you? Of course it does. It bothers me, but what are you going to do? You can’t take it back. What bothers me most is that you are human and are going to make mistakes once in a while, but I kind of dwell on it perhaps a bit too much. It really is only a few people out there who it seems like they are waiting for you to make a screw-up. I guess my point is, what about the rest of the day? What about the rest of the work I did that day? I think somebody said I had a bad day. I didn’t have a bad day. It was one moment during one race. Maybe they had a bad day at the windows? No one wants to make mistakes and of course, they bother me a bit. What was it like to share the mic with the late Sam McKee? Comfortable. It was a privilege. It was just the right combination. There was never any competition. It was like a team and we were friends. All we did was joke all the time. I once told his wife that most of our conversations were inaudible and incoherent, because all we did was laugh. Sometimes when he was downstairs on the set working with Holly (Heyden), who always says funny things, Sam would call me hysterically laughing. I would ask him, ‘What did he say?’ He wouldn’t tell me. He would just hang up because he was laughing too much. That was 90 percent of our conversations. I miss those times. As long as we are here, he’s is still here. What’s the trickiest horse name you’ve ever had to call? There’s so many. Maybe IYQ YQR (I like you like you are). We had trouble figuring it out. Also some of the French horses that came over to Yonkers a few years ago. Some of them were really tough. They weren’t fun. Have you called more Hambletonians than anyone in history? I believe so. Stan Bergstein I think called 17 or 18. I’m up to 20 and it would’ve been 21 but Sam called the Muscle Hill one and I did TV. How has COVID-19 affected you personally? I don’t think I’m any different from anybody else. It is an unprecedented interruption. It’s been a mental challenge and a readjustment. It’s kind of a bad dream and every day you wake up and realize that life isn’t back to normal. You just try to be as productive as possible in different ways. I dusted off an old voice-over course that I never finished, so I’m doing that. I’m a man of routine and I need structure. I’m all over the internet, I read bad stories and good stories. I’ll do projects around the house. I’m at the point where I only have two or three more left. I also go on a two-hour walk every day. I was only working two days a week calling, but it was 50 races a weekend and I was reffing five games on a Sunday. Then all of a sudden, it was pulled out from under me. It has been like the Twilight Zone. If you had the power to change one thing in the sport, what would it be? Have one person in charge, like a commissioner. One of my favorite TV shows is Restaurant Impossible with Chef Robert Irvine. He’s a real kick-ass guy and I wish Harness Racing had someone like that in charge of the sport to get things going and make things happen. How do you view the future of harness racing? I think it is going to be a little more refined. I think it will continue to be fewer racetracks and racing dates, but that will force it to be a stronger product. I don’t think you’ll be saturated with as much racing and it will be more special or seasonal. It is sheer economics. There are fewer horses and they are breeding fewer horses. If you had one wish in life, what would you wish for? That we get out of this health crisis and everyone is kind to each other. The political bickering has really stood out to me amid all of this; just the nonsense. Maybe I’m naïve, but I think people have been kinder to each other since the virus hit. That’s what I wish for. Time for the stretch drive. Best Horse Ever: Muscle Hill Best Trainer Ever: Jimmy Takter Best Driver Ever: Brian Sears Best race you ever saw?:  Art Official beating Somebeachsomewhere in the Meadowlands Pace.